King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

Chicago wasn’t Birmingham, and neither Willis nor Mayor Richard J. Daley was Bull Connor. But racism permeated Chicago life. In the years following World War I, as Black families migrated from the South and a growing number of Black families moved into white neighborhoods, twenty-six Black homes were bombed. In 1919, a race riot left thirty-eight people dead, twenty-five of them Black. Rioters burned the homes of more than one thousand Black people. In response, city officials committed more deeply to segregation. Realtors used contracts that forbade property owners from selling or renting their properties to Black people, as they did in other cities. Chicago and other city governments marked Black neighborhoods as areas of an impending decline in property value—redlining those parts of town, as the process became known, and making it difficult for families there to qualify for bank mortgages. When Black families did move into white neighborhoods, white families often moved out.